Tropical Fruit vs. Deciduous Fruit

Image via Wikipedia

An Australian cricket team in happier days: Perth 2006.

With the Ashes series all but decided in England’s favour. And deservedly so too, perhaps it’s time us Aussies learnt to lose gracefully (hint, hint, Ricky Ponting!). And who better to learn from than the very English who have bested us?

Last Ashes series in Australia, to distract from their teams miserable performance, I read that the Barmy Army took to chanting the following chant:

“We’re fat, we’re round, three dollars to the pound!”

What’s that? The exchange rate? English fans are singing about the performance of their currency in relation to Australia’s? Yes, that was the case - you gotta love those barmy poms!


So, as a distraction of my own: “English food vs. Australian food” or more specifically “Tropical Fruit vs. Deciduous Fruit”. I must warn my readers, however, that I’m no botanist and I am going to using the terms “Tropical” and “Deciduous” shall we say “loosely”. And, if I happen to claim some mediterranean fruits as “tropical” forgive me, in penance I shan’t include the really unbeatable foods like coffee and chocolate because they don’t grow in Australia.

Image via Fir0002, Wikipedia

Australian Mangoes

To begin with: Mangoes. As I was surprised to find earlier this year, you can get mangoes in “Old Blightey”, and I was even more astounded to hear a work colleague confess that she didn’t actually like mangoes! But, the reason is, I suspect, that the mangoes you’ll find in Morrisons or Sainsbury’s aren’t really mangoes. I mean, sure technically they are, but no, not really. A mango isn’t sour. Sure, in the early part of the mango season, you’ll find one with some green sour-ish patches, but the ones one sale in Morrisons could be substituted for lemons! To enjoy the real mango experience, you have to come down under, or better yet, visit India - because in all honesty, the mangoes I tried when I was in India beat anything I have had before or since! When you bite into a ripe red and gold mango you’re biting into a summer’s worth of tropical sunshine, a mango is unbelievably sweet like no other fruit. Sweet but mellow and deliciously juicy, you know it’s ripe and ready to be devoured when you can put it to your nose and literally breath-in the decadent excess of sugar it has stored. Mangoes go straight onto the top of the list.

Next, Strawberries. We get strawberries down here in Australia. Great big juicy Queensland strawberries, some as big as apples, and they taste like... they taste like... well, to be honest, they don’t really taste of anything, I don’t know what the big fuss is with strawberries? Or at least I didn’t until my first ever visit to the Northern Hemisphere, Québec, England, Finland, France, all delivered strawberries that were unbelievably sweet and full of flavour. In Australia, strawberries are generally eaten dipped in sugar and a punnet occasionally rots in the fridge uneaten. In England, a punnet might be finished on the same day it was bought, especially if it was bought from the local farmer’s market.

Image via Wikipedia

French Gariguette strawberries

Blueberries. I could say the same for blueberries as I said for strawberries, and for that matter, blackcurrents, raspberries and cherries. I don’t think blueberries and cherries suffer as much as strawberries from the tendency to tastelessness - they simply don’t grow to enormous, watery proportions like strawberries do - but there’s no doubt they taste better when grown in a cold latitude.

Grapefruit. It’s a bit sour, being a member of the citrus family, but if you follow these directions you can’t go wrong. 1) Cut the grapefruit in half. 2) Cut out the white “pith” from the centre. 3) Cut out the flesh of the fruit into “pizza” segments, but be careful not to cut through the skin. 4) Sprinkle 1 teaspoon of sugar over both halves. 5) Repeat step 4 - it is a member of the citrus family remember. 6) Dump another teaspoon of sugar right in the centre from where you removed the pith. 7) With a teaspoon, eat each of the segments you cut. 8) Now here comes the best part, close your eyes and picture yourself stranded on a tropical island where you haven’t had anything to drink for days, lift the grapefruit half to your lips as if it were a cup, now pour the delicious sugary fruit juice into your mouth, being sure to let some of it miss and run down your cheeks and neck in true Robinson Crusoe style!

Now, you can’t do that in England can you?

Ok ok, next fruit. Deciduous this time. Um, how about apples? Nice, but a bit boring. Then plums? Yeah, they’re delicious, but frankly the more sun the better and Australia has more than England. How about peaches? Ditto what I said about plums. Well, we’ll have to choose a tropical then: chillies! Fiery and exciting, forceful and with a take-no-prisoners attitude, definitely not a fruit for the faint-hearted. Sure you can grown them in England as well as in Australia, but whose temperament do they really suit better?

Well, if you’ve been following the Ashes series this summer, you’d have to say: “England”.

The Battle of the Ashes

Image by 6tee-zeven via Flickr

England's victory in the last Ashes series in 2009
means they are defending the Ashes in Australia
this summer.

I find myself in the rare position of reading Australian newspaper commentators praying for rain ahead of day 5 of the second Ashes Test in Adelaide tomorrow. This has been a tough year for Australian sport.


Notwithstanding Ian Botham’s supreme confidence that this English side will be the first since 1986/87 to retain the Ashes on Australian soil, my own expectations were for another Australian victory. Australia got off to a good start too, with Peter Siddle’s Hat-trick and Brad Haddin and Mike Hussey’s three-ton partnership in Brisbane, I was able to rattle off a gloating email to some colleagues in the UK.

“Doesn’t this seem familiar?”

But I spoke too soon! England fought back with a determination I don’t remember seeing in an England squad in Australia. After England finally managed to dispatch first Haddin and then Hussey they pulled themselves together and dismissed the rest of the team for 481 - this was after having reached 5/450 at the height of the Haddin/Hussey partnership. Even as my emails were traversing cyber-space I was blithely ignoring the ample evidence of English resolve.

The next day proved un-ignorable. England’s opening batsmen Alistair Cook and Andrew Strauss together produced a century each. The day after, another two centuries, and only 1 wicket. Alistair Cook himself proved invincible to all the attacks of Australia’s bowlers. By the final day of the first test, far from thinking that this test was following a rather familiar pattern of the last two decades, I thought that England were being overly cautious in not putting Ponting’s men in to bat earlier and having a crack at winning the test.

Image via Wikipedia

Australian Captain Ricky Ponting has been feeling
the pressure in this Ashes series

So how did we get to this role-reversal? How did we get so far from the familiar the situation that I can recall from childhood, where if I went home to my older brother after losing a game in any sporting competition, my “did my best” defence was only met with jeers and comparisons with Mike Atherton, whereas now it seems like it’s the Australians who are full of excuses for their poor performance (some commentators, oblivious to what blind freddy could see, are claiming that the pitch has been the cause of these indomitable English batsmen).

Now this morning Australia are 4 for 238 and looking to the skies for rain to interrupt the game and save them from a defeat at the hands of the English.

An Australian in England

Image via Wikipedia

The Fourth Test match between Australia and England in
Brisbane 1933 during the height of the "Bodyline" scandal.

I returned to Australia on Thursday. Which means I’m gonna have to change the name of my blog. But on the plus-side, I can throw-out my tie and slacks - you don’t need them in Australian schools! I’ll no longer be getting paid in monopoly money either (during the last Ashes series the Barmy Army could chant “we’re fat, we’re round, 3 dollars to the pound!” now the Great British Pound buys a mere $1.60 but English and Australian teachers are still getting paid the same as during the last Ashes series). The real biggie though is that I can finally enjoy the positive energy of that great big fusion-reactor that sits in the middle of our solar system seeing as it’s no longer perpetually covered by clouds.

(Ok maybe that last point was a bit unfair).

But, readers might wonder, if there’s so much going for Australia - then why did I, among so many other Australians - determine to move to live and work in merry ol’ England for 2010? And how do you explain the army of young Aussies that descend upon London, year after year, rain, hail or shine? (It’s mostly rain by the way) Why also, is there a near permanent population of just-off-the-boat Aussies in west London suburbs such as Earl’s Court, Acton Town and Shepherd’s Bush?

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Thistles, Poppies and Hedgerows in a Hertfordshire field.

I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I think that most British don’t really get just how attached Aussies feel to the United Kingdom - notwithstanding that it’s quite literally on the other side of the world. I remember being really shocked fielding this question from one of my students during a detention this year:

“Sir? Do you have a King or Queen over in Australia?”

To which my response, “Yes, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the second.” Elicited some surprise.

“You mean, the Queen of England is also the Queen of Australia?”

But other than being mutual subjects of Her Majesty the Queen, which by the way, doesn’t actually get you through passport control faster than a citizen of the Republic of Estonia, a lot of Australian culture comes from the United Kingdom as well. Most Australian celebrities are also British celebrities, and sometimes won’t become famous in Australia until first “making it” in England. Think of the Kylie and Dannii Minogue, Peter André and Rolf Harris for example, who all live in the UK, and watching BBC Morning in London, one wouldn’t be particularly surprised to see actor Ray Meagher chatting on the couch about doing a West-End Show (ok, maybe I was a little surprised trying to picture “strike-me”, “flamin’”, “pack of galas” Alf in “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”). But also most Australian intellectuals find themselves housed in London as well, if only to escape Australia’s oppressively ignorant “matey” culture: Germaine Greer for one, but also Barry Humphries and Geoffrey Robertson.

For me, the biggest tie to the British Isles was my upbringing in an essentially British, not just Anglo-Saxon, culture. Which may sound strange coming from a Finnish Australian, with a father born in the Keski-Suomi region of Finland and a Scottish mother who had few nice things to say about those “perfidious Albions”. Maybe it was Jo, Bessie and Fanny from Enid Blyton’s “Magic Faraway Tree”, or those Pevensie kids, or Badger, Rat, Mole and Toad of Toad Hall, but I think I have been imbibing English culture from before I was even old enough to know that I didn’t actually live in England.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
A country path in southern England.

You can imagine then, the excitement that I got, notwithstanding that I was 21, when I first got to witness the marks on the window that were evidence of Jack Frost having been during the night - when I was growing-up Jack Frost was as elusive as the Sandman - who I’d try stay-up for but never catch! Or when I went on a tour of the Cotswolds and got to spot Gloucester - a place hitherto only associated with showers of rain and puddles able to swallow-up any passing Doctors. Or seeing, Foxes, or Hedgehogs, or hedgerows between fields, or aerial views of the country that had that “patchwork quilt” division of land. For an Australian, England is almost like Narnia, some fantasy-land that you’ve read and heard so much about but never seen (other than on the television) and for better or for worse THIS has become an integral part of Australia’s heritage, this: “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle... this happy breed of men... this precious stone set in the silver sea... this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”.

Related articles

• Bad light mars play as Aussies make silly point (independent.co.uk)
• The Ashes 2010: England have no fear of Australia, says pace bowler Stuart Broad (telegraph.co.uk)

So... did you hear about the Rugby on the weekend?

Some Rugby news: In Perth over the weekend, despite having a half-strength team through injuries, having the side reduced to 14 men and England being awarded two penalty-tries the Wallabies still managed to beat England 27-17.

Over the same weekend, an England squad sans Ferdinand and Beckham managed to throw away a victory over the United States thanks to a costly Robert Green fumble.

But of course, entering the classroom how am I greeted this Monday?

"Four nil!" was the students' reception when I entered my classroom today.
"Sir, when you watch the world cup do you prefer to sit further from the telly or Klose?"
"What's the date today sir? It isn't the FOUR-teenth is it?"
"Sir, how old are you? Not twenty-FOUR?" (actually twenty-six but what the hey?)
etc., etc., etc.

Every conceivable question whose answer might contain a four was asked of me today - just to rub some salt into the wound left by Germany's drilling of Australia on Sunday. Even the other teachers were none too sympathetic when I told them how I was greeted in the classroom.

"Well, one should hope so. The Australians were terrible."

The closest I got to sympathy was one teacher who reminded me of the above-mentioned Rugby result.

Losing to England in the Twenty20 last month didn't help either. And of course, England are currently holding the Ashes and not likely to lose it till Christmas (C'mon you can't expect England to beat Australia in Australia in a game of cricket!). It seems that I've come to England at the perfect time for a great big serving of humble pie and the English aren't losing any opportunities to watch me eat after all the years of being a bigger and richer country than Australia but always losing in sporting competitions.

The last Olympics in Beijing was the firstOlympics since 1988 where Great Britain got higher in the medal tally than Australia. In that same time period Australia won 9 out of the 11 Ashes series played. Over the same period Australia has likewise dominated England in the Rugby - although it has been a lot closer competition Australia beating England 23 times from the two sides' last 38 encounters. So when we finally come to the original football - the World Game - the English are only too happy to gloat whilst watching Australia flounder amongst the big names of Football.

However, if either Germany or England come second in their group (but not both) then we will get an oppurtunity to see how the English fair against this German World Cup squad. So if Australia don't get a chance to play England maybe Germany will - we'll see who gets the last laugh then in this long rivalry between nations.

(C'mon it's football not cricket - it'll probably be England).